Cut Back on Words

Imagine this scenario.

It’s Thursday afternoon, 3pm. Your boss comes to your desk, obviously panicked. He explains that a small group of senior managers from headquarters in Sydney will be at your office tomorrow morning for a sales update. Everyone needs to prepare. Your job, he explains, will be to deliver a 20-minute presentation explaining how the recent economic downturn caused sales to go flat, and to make positive projections for the coming year. “Drop everything and get to work on it now,” he says. “You’re on at 9:30 tomorrow morning.”

As he leaves, your head falls into your hands. A 20-minute presentation? Tomorrow morning? What am I going to say?

So, you call up PowerPoint on your laptop and begin filling your slides with words, words, words so you don’t forget what you want to say.

You’ve seen PowerPoint presentations like this yourself, I’m sure. From beginning to end, each slide is up to 150 words worth of nothing but text. As a result, the presenter stands in front facing the screen reading each word to you. How long can you listen to this attentively?

If you are delivering a presentation using text, remember, less is more. Rather than designing slides with full sentences and even paragraphs, stick with short bullet points for each main idea. Read the bullet point to the audience, and elaborate spontaneously with the details. If you need help remembering details, use an outline on a separate piece of paper in your hand or, better, on the table in front of you and glance at it when you need to.

The main advantage of using few words is that your audience will remember your main ideas more easily. Show them a slide filled with 150 words and they’ll remember nothing when you move on. Show them a few clear bullets representing your main ideas, however, and these will stick with them, especially if you present them effectively.

How many words can you get away with? Use this as a design guideline: No more than five bullet points per slide and no more than five words per bullet. Twenty-five words. That’s about the most your audience can handle.

Keep this in mind: The more you read, the more they know. The more they know, the more they forget. The more they forget, the less they know. So don’t read.